44: a Dublin Memoir, By Peter Sheridan, Macmillan, 295 pp, £14.99 in UK
Several years ago, I wrote a memoir that pretended to be a cat book, and thereafter my wife and I could have stepped into starring roles in a remake of The Curse of the Cat People. The week still does not pass without the arrival of greetings cards featuring felines being cuddly and/or graceful and/ or cute. Casual friends send us cat books at Christmas, and from intimates we get cat carvings and cat ceramics. Once we even received, from America of course, a cat hat-and-coat rack. When I opened a photographic exhibition, I was presented with a huge picture - framed - of a mog, which snarls down at me over the morning porridge. When I launched a friend's book, I went up a notch; this time I was given a colour photograph of a lioness.
A pigeon-hole is a most comfortable place - for everyone, that is, except the pigeon. For an over-worked journalist, it is heaven-sent; it provides him with a handle; he has only to grab it, and there is the victim's cadaver, laid out on the table in the pathology lab, dissection-ready and oven-wrapped. And never mind cats; think, for example, of a Samuel Goldwyn, a Louis B. Mayer or an Adolph Zukor, and at once an image is evoked of Hasidic Jews starving in Poland, Latvia or Lithuania, of pushcart migrations to America, of nickelodeons and, later, sound stages in Culver City and Gower Gulch, of United Artists, MGM or Paramount.
Cliches, like diamonds, are forever. Angela's Ashes seems to have neatly tipped the Irish rite-of-passage memoir out of its mould and set it, quivering, on its plate. Poverty, rat droppings, the school of hard knocks, the groping pedagogue, the first knee-trembler, the loss of innocence, the boy blinking out of the ghetto into the light of day: these are the mandatory ingredients. One could go back to young Francie, the daughter of Katie and Johnny Nolan of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn or Frank O'Connor itals 7 accent (ne Michael O Donovan) in An Only Child or even, to a certain extent, Stephen Dedalus. And if extra seasoning is needed, one should pay heed to the aforementioned Sam Goldwyn, who is reputed to have said: what we need are some new cliches.
Recently in this newspaper, Kathyrn Holmquist suggested that the collision of Irishness and childhood evoke a predictable literary lexicon. She can find only one swallow, Angela's Ashes, to make this wintry summer, but adds that Peter Sheridan's 44: a Dublin Memoir arrives with perfect timing. It is as if the wretch stood accused of committing autobiography aforethought. In her thesis, it is immaterial that the Sheridan family is too happy a crew to fulfil her own criterion of general misery. One suspects, though, that a critic who can equate a working-class Irish childhood with real poverty has led a life that is perhaps on the lee side of sheltered.
Ms Holmquist refers to what she describes as my own uber-memoir, Home Before Night (the OED does not offer a definition of the prefix uber, either with or without an umlaut and offers two quotations, both given out of context). This is by way of adding the redoubtable Mammy-figure to the Irish stew, and I am credited with the Irish male's approach of rejecting the mother entirely, which, pardon me, I never did. And Peter Sheridan is declared to have added his voice to the throng, which suggests a new riddle: how many Irish writers does it take to make a multitude?
If Mr Sheridan's book does not conform to a pattern, it is perhaps because his parents and siblings, as depicted, suffer the handicap of enjoying their lives; as Tolstoy observed, all happy families resemble each other. The comedy grinds to a stop when one of the seven children suffers a brain tumour and dies, and the family's inability to exorcise its grief is used to impose a shape on the final chapters. Until then, there are what Joe Gargery would describe as larks. This, for much of its distance, is a wildly funny book, mainly when Da is putting up a television aerial or turning half of the northside into Flanders Field in his attempt to correct the plumbing of a washing machine.
Da works as a ticket clerk in Amiens Street station - he knows, and such is real power, the destination of the Mystery Train. (I have a memory of my parents and myself being decanted to our surprise into Kilkenny, and my mother looking at the Nore and the castle and then saying sulkily, with three long hours to kill and two shillings in her purse: now what?) He is stubborn, vainglorious and opinionated; he is what we would have called an old bags; whereas Ma is the calm eye of the hurricane.
She makes room for four male lodgers as a means of putting money by for the kids' education. The kindliest of the boarders takes the young Peter to Killarney Races and molests him sexually. If this is a cliche, then to one degree or another, it happened to most of us. For some it is shattering; the more streetwise chalk it down to what the late Arthur Marshall, himself an urbane and fastidious molester, described as life's rich pageant. (Better not put that stuff in a book, one hears a critic saying. It's part of life, and life's been done!)
After the death of Frankie, aged 10, Da fretted for a while, then made a botch of dyeing his hair - purple was the local consensus - and he and the kids became involved in amateur dramatics. One can see a Seville Place affinity for the O'Casey of The Shadow of a Gunman and Juno and the Paycock, but Waiting for Godot invites a question mark. Da, we are told, played Pozzo, Peter and his brother Johnny were Vladimir and Lucky, and another brother, Shea (read Jim Sheridan), directed. To perform Beckett - no, merely to want to perform Beckett - requires either an utter, womb-like innocence or a deep knowledge of words and the theatre. Unless the author has been hoaxing us up to this point, the Sheridans were between the two and a long way from either. I would at least like to know what a northside audience made of the play. A great scene a faire is missing here, and we are told only that Godot served as an agent which cauterised the family's grief.
For most of the way, until Significance almost gets the better of it, this is a warm and lovely book. Mr Sheridan employs the short sentences of a teenaged boy looking out at the world through the window of the waiting room where, in our teens, we bide our hour, waiting for life to begin. (Often, when at last it does, we realise we have had the best part of it.) Da is a smashing character, but Ma is pushed into the traditional back seat of the Irish mammy.
There is dust-jacket blurb from Frank McCourt and Neil Jordan. The latter describes the author's prose as "as rich as his characters, ordinary and fabulous, tragic and hilarious". With such a breathless encomium, I am reminded of the late Sydney Bernstein, who said, when I embellished my synopsis of a projected script, the better to make a sale: "You forgot about the werewolf."
Hugh Leonard's new play Love in the Title is now on at the Abbey Theatre